Shamsiddinkhan Babakhanov

Shamsiddinkhan Ziyovuddinkhan ugli Babakhanov was born in Tashkent on 8 April 1937 into a family of Islamic scholars: his grandfather Ishan Babakhan and his father Ziyauddinkhan ibn Ishan Babakhan had successively headed the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM). He received his first religious education at home, finished Tashkent School No. 28 and in 1955 entered the English faculty of the Tashkent Institute of Foreign Languages.

From 1961 he was a postgraduate student at the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow, specialising in Arabic philology. From 1962 he worked in the Department of International Relations of Muslim Organisations of the USSR and in the 1960s studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. In 1973 he defended the candidate’s dissertation “The Category of the Dual Number in the Arabic Language” and later became a doctor of philological sciences.

In 1974 he became pro-rector and in 1975 rector of the Imam al-Bukhari Tashkent Islamic Institute, the only higher Islamic school in the USSR. He brought leading theologians and orientalists to teach there, strengthened its facilities and promoted the publication of study aids.

In October 1982 a congress in Tashkent elected him to succeed his father as chairman of SADUM and mufti of five republics; after his father’s death in December 1982 he also headed the USSR Muslim organisations’ Department of International Relations. Under him monuments of Islamic culture were restored, the administration’s printing house moved into a new building, and in 1985 he chaired the council for a new edition of the Quran. From 1985 he was a full member of the Royal Islamic Academy of Jordan. He received the Abu Ali ibn Sina International Prize and the Soviet Order of Friendship of Peoples.

In February 1989, after clerics gathered at the Barakhan madrasa demanded his removal, he resigned as head of the administration. He then worked as a senior researcher at the Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. From 1994 to 2001 he was Uzbekistan’s ambassador to the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and from 2001 to 2003 an adviser to the foreign minister.

His publications include a book about his father (in Russian in 1999, in Uzbek in 2001). Shamsiddinkhan Babakhanov died on 15 April 2003 and was buried in the family crypt at the Gʻoyib-ota cemetery in Tashkent.